Brand Personalities of Global Wine Exporters: A Collective Reputation Theory Perspective

This study examines the perceptions of the personalities that wine drinkers attribute to the wines of the six top exporting countries. An exploratory study with an inductive approach was used, and data were collected from 757 wine consumers from 22 countries. Based on the collective reputation theory, we question the use of standardized versus localized strategy when approaching international markets by the top producers of the world. By means of correspondence analysis, our results indicate that each wine producer country tends to have a different positioning among consumers from different regions of the world. Besides, it is evident that a standardized approach to marketing and promotion of a specific country’s wines to global markets could be viewed as rather myopic, representing a gross oversimplification of reality, and contradicting what our findings reveal about differences in global consumers’ perceptions of wines from the big six producers.     

Is there structure in the selection interview? Evidence from hotels in Switzerland

Many studies have shown that structured interviews have better predictive validity than unstructured interviews. The aim of this study was, then, to examine if recruiters in Swiss hotels use structured interviews to select candidates. Results obtained on 150 recruiters indicate that selection interviews are rather unstructured. They also show that selection interviews are more structured in larger hotels than in smaller hotels and in chain hotels than in independent hotels. Finally, and contrarily to one of the hypotheses, selection interviews are not more structured in four-star and five-star hotels than in three-star hotels.     

How Various Segments of Visitors Perceive l’Accueil in the Places Where They Eat,Sleep, and Play

‘Accueil’ is a French word that means feeling welcome somewhere and being introduced into a process that takes the visitor from being an outsider (a stranger) to being an insider (one of us). Accueil also means feeling the host’s genuine pleasure in welcoming his or her guests through words, attitudes, and actions. Based on a survey (n = 1,003) done for the Quebec Department of Tourism¹, we look at how different segments of visitors perceived the ‘accueil’ they received while traveling in the province of Quebec. The results are analysed for lodging, restaurants and attractions. We found that accueil is perceived differently depending on the age of the visitor, the group size and its composition. To a lesser extend, it is also influenced by gender and social status. The characteristics of the trip (distance, purpose and length) have little impact on accueil.     

Sustainability and visitor management in tourist historic cities: the case of Santiago de Compostela,Spain

Tourism has a leading role in heritage cities and this implies a major challenge. The overall objective of this paper is to evaluate the performance of tourism planning and management with the view of achieving sustainable tourism in the historic center of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The study addresses topics collected during a long research process of more than 10 years, such as strategic tourism plans, the implementation of quality management systems for tourism, the tourist supply and the regulation of flows. The results show a destination that has introduced alternatives to improve the tourism experience and diversify its offer beyond the Camino de Santiago. There is also growing concern in promoting the sustainability of the historic center. From our point of view, the strengthening of synergies between the different agents involved in the tourism sector of the city has been a key factor in dealing with this situation. However, in this sense, the main problem which is decongesting the tourist flows to the cathedral and its surroundings is still unresolved.     

Pleasure and the Control of Food Intake: An Embodied Cognition Approach to Consumer Self‐Regulation

Consumers try to avoid temptation when exposed to appetizing foods by diverting their attention away from their senses (e.g., sight, smell, mouthfeel) and bodily states (e.g., state of arousal, salivation) in order to focus on their longer term goals (e.g., eating healthily, achieving an ideal body weight). However, when not including sensations in their decision‐making processes, consumers risk depleting their self‐regulatory resources, potentially leading to unhealthy food choices. Conversely, based on the concept of “embodied self‐regulation,” the suggestion is made that considering bodily states may help consumers regulate their food choices more effectively. A new model is proposed that facilitates understanding observed consumer behavior and the success or failure of self‐control in food intake. It is argued that bodily states and sensory information should be considered when modeling consumer behavior and developing health‐related advocacy and communication campaigns. The model proposed here leads to new perspectives on consumer consumption behavior and health policy research and strategies.     

STOCHASTIC LOCAL INTENSITY LOSS MODELS WITH INTERACTING PARTICLE SYSTEMS

It is well known from the work of Schönbucher that the marginal laws of a loss process can be matched by a unit increasing time inhomogeneous Markov process, whose deterministic jump intensity is called local intensity. The stochastic local intensity (SLI) models such as the one proposed by Arnsdorf and Halperin allow to get a stochastic jump intensity while keeping the same marginal laws. These models involve a nonlinear stochastic differential equation (SDE) with jumps. The first contribution of this paper is to prove the existence and uniqueness of such processes. This is made by means of an interacting particle system, whose convergence rate toward the nonlinear SDE is analyzed. Second, this approach provides a powerful way to compute pathwise expectations with the SLI model: we show that the computational cost is roughly the same as a crude Monte Carlo algorithm for standard SDEs.     

A Spatiotemporal Solution for the Simultaneous Sale Price and Time‐on‐the‐Market Problem

There exists an important methodological challenge when dealing with sale price and time‐on‐the‐market variables because both variables are simultaneously determined and related to the motivation of the sellers and buyers. Exploiting the fact that transactions occur over space and time, we propose a two‐stage approach based on instrumental variables (IV) built from information collected from previous transactions. The unidirectional temporal property and the fact that other transactions are exogenous from the perspective of a single buyer or seller are exploited to evaluate the effect of the sale price on time‐on‐the‐market, and the effect of time‐on‐the‐market on the sale price. Based on 29,471 transactions occurring in the suburban neighborhood of Montréal (1992‐2000), the results suggest that, everything else being equal, houses staying longer on the market provide negative information to the market, which results in a lower final sale price, while the final sale price is negatively related to time‐on‐the‐market, indicating that houses of better quality (better amenities) stay less time on the market.